


What Was Missing

by catonatrain



Category: BoJack Horseman
Genre: Coming Out, Divorce, F/F, Questioning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-21
Updated: 2017-10-21
Packaged: 2019-01-21 02:54:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,169
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12448194
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/catonatrain/pseuds/catonatrain
Summary: Following major shakeups in their respective personal lives, Princess Carolyn and Diane Nguyen begin to examine themselves and wonder if what they feel was missing in their lives is a lot closer to them than they think.





	What Was Missing

What Was Missing  
A Princess Carolyn/Diane Nguyen story

Chapter 1

Monday, August 21, 2017, 7:00 am

Princess Carolyn looked in the mirror shortly after waking up, barely able to keep her eyes open. Which was probably just as well, because she didn’t want to get a good look at herself in her threadbare purple bathrobe and how-many-years-old-now curler in the tuft of fur on her forehead. She blinked twice and felt grateful that at least she didn’t have to worry about Todd hanging around her place anymore, even though his latest cockamamie scheme now left her apartment smelling like whipped cream and toothpaste. She supposed it wasn’t the worst smell in the grand scheme of things.

It wasn’t that she didn’t want to wake up and face another day — after all, she’d just netted BoJack the title role in the new web series _Philbert_ , which she was sure would be not only the right thing to save his career after the PR disaster of vanishing for a year after hearing he wasn’t actually an Oscar nominee, but also a personal vindication after a decade’s worth of false starts, hissy fits and ill-advised nights in bed with her most difficult client.

Still, a profound sense of personal dissatisfaction crept over her as she splashed water in her eyes (always a good way to make herself recoil and hiss) and forced herself awake. She muttered the first words that came to her mind during a time such as this one: “Fish, fish, fish.”

The dissatisfaction came in the form of an insight about herself that she was embarrassed she hadn’t realized much earlier in life: there seemed to be a fundamental contradiction between two of her strongest personal attributes, those of never giving up but at the same time refusing to be a doormat. She let out a sigh and wondered if in order to not be a doormat, you had to be a quitter.

Some would definitely accuse her of being a doormat for BoJack, given all the times she’d come to his rescue, whether it was spending hours on the phone trying (and most often failing) to convince a director that BoJack deserved a role, or cleaning up the puke that he woke up drenched in after a night of soused self-loathing. Her having essentially played mommy as well as lover (she did wonder at times what Sigmund Frog would’ve made of him) to BoJack for so many years made the fact that she still wasn’t a mother herself sting that much more.

Then the notion of the flip side of doormat-hood, quitting, turned her stomach like a glass of sour milk. To someone watching from the outside, it definitely would’ve looked like she’d just told Ralph to get lost out of cowardice and an unwillingness to try harder. _You should’ve just kept trying! You need to set a good example for women your age, to prove they really can do anything! You finally find a good guy who truly respects you and you don’t just dump him, you turn into a goddamn lush over it! What the hell has gotten into you, PC??_

She paused to take several deep breaths in an effort to dispel the clanging scrap metal noise of her self-doubt, counting to five for each inhale and exhale. This exercise did ensure that she was now fully alert and as calm as she could manage at the moment, but one thought continued to occupy her:

_Something is missing._

What could be missing? A sense of organization, perhaps? That certainly would help her get her shit together after weeks of going off the rails. But organization couldn’t just be turned on again like a switch. To get it back, she’d have to start by making amends to the most organized person she knew. It was worth the risk of appearing like a doormat if she could reaffirm her reputation as a loyal agent- ahem, manager. The last thing she wanted to be was another opportunistic bitch like Vanessa Gekko.

She pulled out her phone and was pleased to see she hadn’t actually deleted his number. She dialed and he answered on the second ring.

“Hello, Judah? I was thinking, I really owe you an apology. Can you meet me at VIM in an hour?”

\-------

10:00 am

That same morning, Diane Nguyen made an effort to put on her most neutral expression when entering the offices of Carrion & Anh Family Law for her scheduled consultation about divorce options. A thought nagged at her that she was being disloyal for having chosen to make this visit without Mr. Peanutbutter by her side, but having him with her would have inevitably brought its own share of problems — rambling tangents, emotional appeals of the sort that were so common when they attempted couples’ therapy, inevitable comparisons to his two previous exes. In any case, if he wanted to spend the past couple days traveling to Oregon with his brother so they could howl at the solar eclipse in its path of totality, that was his business. This was hers.

Besides, she thought by choosing a law firm where one of the partners was also Vietnamese-American she could get the benefit of the doubt on her side of the story through a measure of coethnic solidarity. It wasn’t an angle she liked to play often but she felt that getting as many advantages in her column as she could wouldn’t hurt. At least, that’s what she thought until she found herself face-to-face with a bespectacled turkey vulture that she could only assume was not Gregory Anh.

“Hello, I’m Diane Nguyen, are you the one who’s handling my consultation today?” she asked the man somewhat hesitantly, sticking out her hand to be shaken. He met it with a firm grip of his plumage and replied, “Aurelius Carrion, attorney at law at the offices of Carrion & Anh. A pleasure to meet you, Ms. Nguyen.” 

Diane adjusted her glasses as she sat down at Carrion’s desk and hoped her face didn’t betray a feeling of surprise or disappointment. Sure, divorce was a heavy matter and it would’ve certainly caught Carrion off-guard if she’d come in with a big toothy grin (not that she had that expression a lot in the first place), but at the same time, the last thing she wanted to do was alienate someone who would help her get on with her life. Lawyers weren’t cheap, and she wasn’t exactly raking it in at Girl Croosh.

The next part was something that Diane knew was coming but she still dreaded, and would’ve still dreaded even if she’d seen Anh instead of Carrion. He asked her in a disturbingly cheerful voice, “So, what is it that brings you to my office today?”

How could she answer that without sounding heartless and petty? Surely this man had had all sorts of other clients come through whose situations were far, far worse than hers. Alcoholics. Wife batterers. Serial cheaters. Mr. Peanutbutter was none of these. For many women he would seem to be a total Prince Charming, and the blame for the dissolution of his previous two marriages lay squarely on the shoulders of his ex-wives. And here she was, having realized her marriage was a dead end because her husband was... _too generous?!_ She was convinced Carrion would laugh at her.

At least, since she wanted to come off as organized and in control as possible in a situation like this one, she’d already rehearsed what she’d say before coming into the law offices. 

“Well, I have to say that it’s not a matter of being mistreated here, it’s just that I feel like the novelty has worn off in my marriage, so to speak. It’s been fun a good amount of the time but I just don’t feel like I have something meaningful and substantial anymore. I care a lot for Mr. Peanutbutter and ideally I wouldn’t want our marriage ending to cause a permanent rift between us since I really value him as a friend but I just can’t keep pretending that this is everything I ultimately wanted in life.”

Carrion rubbed his beak contemplatively. “Well, Ms. Nguyen, let me reassure you that more people come into my office with your sort of concerns than you might think. For cases like yours, I usually recommend deviating from the standard court procedure because you seem rather firm in your desire to retain a friendship with your husband. Divorce definitely isn’t a one-size-fits-all thing and couples who go down the usual route hoping to still be on good terms with each other too often are embittered by the process and wind up in as acrimonious a situation as couples who never want to see each other again.” This particular clarification made Diane wince as she recalled the previously unprecedented tension that had erupted between her and Mr. Peanutbutter during her husband’s unplanned and ludicrous attempt to become governor.

Carrion continued, “In recent years there’s been a trend toward divorces that skip the court proceedings altogether and negotiate the process in a more mediation-based way. We call it collaborative law and it’s conducted privately between a lawyer like myself and the couple in question, without the stress of undoing your marriage in a setting that also deals with people accused of murder.” Upon seeing Diane’s eyes go wide, he chuckled and said, “Sorry, sometimes I forget not everyone appreciates dark humor. It’s a vulture thing.”

“Anyway, in collaborative law you have a lot more privacy and you can even have other people who have tried to work with you — a couples therapist, perhaps — intervene and try to talk you through the best solutions for officially dissolving the marriage and negotiating the division of your assets. Here, if you want to learn more about it I have a brochure about the process that you might want to have a look at.” Diane took the brochure from Carrion and told him, “Thank you for all your insights, Mr. Carrion. I’ll look into this and contact you when I’ve talked to Mr. Peanutbutter about this and gotten him to agree to it.”

Upon leaving Carrion’s office and walking back to her car, Diane wondered, _would_ Mr. Peanutbutter agree to it? Sure, the last few weeks had seen them be more distant and terse with each other than they had been at any other time in their marriage. And while there was undeniably an elephant in the room between them, she had not yet explicitly said the word “divorce” to him as a possibility for the future. A lot of that did have to do with them not speaking a lot in general, but she honestly did not know how he would react when she would summon up the resolve to share what Carrion had told her with him. She knew him well enough to trust that he wouldn’t react in an angry or violent manner, but she could definitely see him feeling hurt over the fact that she had waited until he was out of town to investigate divorce as a possibility. She grumbled to herself, “Way to go, Diane, he’s gonna come home from a fun trip with his brother only to find that his wife betrayed him.” She knew that ultimately she had to put her own well-being first, considering that the contrary was what had kept their marriage seemingly afloat in the first place, but it still wasn’t easy to convince herself of it.

And if Mr. Peanutbutter was totally okay with it and she wound up divorcing him cleanly with a minimum of bruised feelings, then what? It wasn’t as if she was going to do Great Things immediately upon becoming single again. Girl Croosh was decent enough, and she particularly appreciated the flexibility of Stefani letting her take breaks from work to go to appointments like this one, but the idea that this would be the peak of her career after having previously written two best-selling books made her laugh bitterly. But beyond that, she knew she couldn’t fill the space that Mr. Peanutbutter would leave with work alone. There were enough hard-nosed career gals in Hollywoo and at this point she didn’t need anything else in her life that could cause people to paint her as a heartless bitch.

_Something is missing._

The thought popped into her head with enough clarity that it startled and scared her. What? What was missing? She didn’t need some sort of additional existential crisis in the midst of one of the most upsetting times in her personal life! Yet it continued to echo in her head for the whole duration of her drive back to her workplace.

She didn’t need this now. What she did need was to forgo her lunch break in favor of using one of Girl Croosh’s fancy new NapPods, which she had thought were silly and childish when Stefani first unveiled them but now fully understood their purpose.


End file.
